Advances in Mid-IR Fiber Lasers: Tellurite, Fluoride and Chalcogenide

Abstract

Abstract:A review on the recent progress in modeling and fabrication of medium infrared (Mid-IR) fiber lasers is reported. The main objective is to illustrate some recent examples of continuous wave optical sources at wavelengths longer than those commonly employed in telecom applications and allowing high beam quality. A small number of Mid-IR lasers, among the large variety of schemes, glasses, dopants and pumping schemes reported in literature, is selected on the basis of their slope efficiency and threshold pump power. In particular, tellurite, fluoride and chalcogenide fiber lasers are considered. More details are given with reference to the novel pumping schemes.

Modelling and Design of Lanthanide Ion-Doped Chalcogenide Fiber Lasers: Progress towards the Practical Realization of the First MIR Chalcogenide Fiber Laser

“…More recent studies have concentrated on the improvement of the lasing efficiency, while finding alternatives to the cascade pumping scheme [29][30][31][32]. In [31], use of dual pump was proposed to bring the lasing efficiency above 20%.…”

Microstructured Fibers Based on Tellurite Glass for Nonlinear Conversion of Mid-IR Ultrashort Optical Pulses

“…Compact fiber-based sources generating optical pulses with a broadband spectrum in the mid-IR range beyond 3 µm are in demand for basic science and many applications, including spectroscopy, biomedicine, sensing, remote diagnostics, and others [1,2]. Since silica fibers are not transparent in this range (excluding hollow core optical fibers [3]), special fibers based on soft glasses, such as fluoride, chalcogenide, or tellurite, are used [1,2,4]. Due to nonlinear optical effects, it is possible to obtain supercontinuum generation in optical soft-glass fibers of special design [5][6][7][8].…”

Experimental Investigation of Actively Q-Switched Er3+:ZBLAN Fiber Laser Operating at around 2.8 µm

“…Mid-infrared (MIR) fiber lasers with emitting wavelength near to 3 µm have numerous applications in sensing [1][2][3][4]. This is because these MIR fiber lasers exploit one of the most informative regions of the electromagnetic spectrum for molecular recognition.…”